Thursday, June 18, 2009

Serendipity: A strength of print

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I was thumbing through my Sunday newspaper earlier this week when I came upon a full-page feature that, despite the dullness of the topic and my own lack of interest in government finance, drew me in. “State Budget 101” featured a cartoon professor walking you through a plain-English explanation of the key issues underlying California’s budget crisis with simple-to-understand charts and graphs. Here’s what it looked like:

It struck me, as I dug into the feature, that this is the kind of thing that newspapers should be doing. Enough innovative, useful material like this could entice a lot of people back to reading the daily dead-tree version of the news.

The same information can, of course, be found online. In fact, this same feature is available on the Web in an interactive format:

But here’s the main difference between a print newspaper and an online feature:

I would never, ever, click a link to “California Budget 101: Making sense of the state’s financial meltdown.”

My eyes would skip right past it as my brain subconsciously noted that it has something to do with budgets and finance, not my strong suit nor a focus of interest. But when I turned the page and saw the feature there, all in one place with its appealing graphics and a promise of simplifying something complex, I paid attention.

That’s serendipitous discovery of content.

As I noted a few weeks back, rather than introducing more and more compelling content like this, most newspapers have grown timid. Turning a page means finding more AP and Reuters coverage of stories you’ve already read on some news site because you learned about it on Twitter. With that kind of content, it’s no wonder people are abandoning newspapers.

But turning a page and seeing something you didn’t expect, something you never would have looked for, but that makes you go “wow,” that’s a capability that newspaper publishers need to exploit. And as long as I continue to find content like that in the Bay Area News Group’s newspapers, I’ll keep subscribing. (Incidentally, this is also a strength to be leveraged in internal communications, helping to simplify complex issues for employees that they would never click to view on the intranet.)

One suggestion, though. While the interactive, online version of the feature included a PDF of the print version, there was no link to the interactive page in the newspaper. Tighter integration between print and online will only bolster print’s value.

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #458: June 18, 2009

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Content summary: Guest line-up confirmed for next FIR Live on Blogtalk Radio on June 26; Dan York reports on iPhone OS 3.0, TweetDeck, and more; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits - Top PR firms fail to make the grade online, British Airways asks its marketing team to work for free, study shows crowdsourcing and social networking urged in stimulus oversight, from the Strange But True PR Dept: confronting the power of the Blackberry ‘to save relationships in business and politics’; listeners’ comments discussion; music from Candye Kane; and more.

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (25.6Mb, 63:57)
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Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for June 18, 2009: A 64-minute podcast recorded live from Wokingham, Berkshire, England, and Concord, California, USA.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #458 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Monday June 22…

Beating the dead “who should own social media” horse

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Every now and then, someone digs up the dead who-should-own-social-media horse so we can all beat on it for a while more. While I question the notion of anyone “owning” social media in an organization, it’s worth considering where responsibility for coordination of a company’s social media efforts should reside. Yes, social media at its best is organic, but inconsistencies in its application can make a company look inept and at best; at worst, it can send dramatically different messages that could damage the company’s reputation.

I’ve always come down on the side of public relations assuming that responsibility. Building relationships is the bread and butter of a day’s work for good PR people. Only the tools of social media are new. Marketing and advertising have traditionally been one-way, top-down affairs.

But now somebody’s gone and put some numbers to where the function actually does reside. A survey conducted by email marketing organization StrongMail has found that PR is responsible for social media in only 9% of the organizations represented by study respondents. Nearly a third said it was a shared responsibility among mutliple departments but a shade more—35%—said direct marketing managed social media in their companies.

This perhaps isn’t much of a surprise considering the survey was aimed at direct marketing customers of StrongMail (about 500 direct marketing executives responded), but these are the numbers we’ve got until somebody undertakes a more comprehensive analysis.

Only 5% said their companies had dedicated social media departments.

I do like the cross-functional governance model, which works astoundingly well in intranet management, but these tend to be best for big-picture planning, not dealing with the day-to-day minutiae of a company’s presence in everything from Twitter and Facebook to company blogs and responses to posts and comments on other blogs. You also have to decide which department will chair the cross-functional team, an administrative task to be sure, but not an unimportant one.

I found it a bit troubling that direct marketers responding to the survey said they see social media as a direct marketing channel. They’re planning significant increases in their social media spending in the last half of the year. If you think getting an unwanted press release pushed at you through a social media channel is irritating, wait until you start getting the kind of crap send to you through other channels by direct marketers. Of course, some creative, savvy direct marketers will figure out that it’s all about conversation with customers about things they care about, but most, I fear, will just find ways to send via social media the same godawful fliers that show up in your analog mailbox.

That’s inevitable, since 66% of those responding to the survey say they’re going to integrate email marketing and social media; 48% have already set a strategy for doing so. Of marketers planning to increase budgets in 2009, 83% will increase their email marketing spend while 62% will boost their social media budgets. This tells me that email marketing isn’t nearly as dead as a lot of social media pundits believe it is; while they’re dancing on email’s grave, their inboxes will be continue to be flooded.

To its credit, StrongMail (which announced a new social media “framework” in tandem with the study results) sees direct email marketing as a means of driving engagement in social networks by “alerting members of new content and updates.” But the study results suggest more direct marketers are interested in figuring out how to measure the results of direct marketing campaigns using social media (55%) than in figuring out how to make sure their efforts actually achieve business goals (48%). There’s strategic thinking for you.

Of course, even though the best PR practitioners are focused on relationship-building—the key to effective social media engagement—not every PR department embraces that view of public relations. Ultimately, whoever in your organization is most attuned to building relationships, and best equipped to figure out how to tap into social media to build those relationships, is probably the best bet for coordinating the company’s online engagement efforts.

Monday, June 15, 2009

The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #457: June 15, 2009

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Content summary: How to subscribe to the new FIR email newsletter; next FIR Live on Blogtalk Radio on June 26 will feature guest Gary Vaynerchuk; Eric Schwartzman interviews Leysia Palen, social media crisis communications researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder; the Media Monitoring Minute with CustomScoop; News That Fits: the role of social media in political expression with contrasts from Iran and Australia, companies are using blogs to reach employees says IABC Research Foundation survey, social media plays large role in Refugee Week communication campaign in the UK, linking as a communication strategy; listeners’ comments discussion including WH Smith travel guide boycott; music from The Watermarks; and more.

Get FIR:

• Download the MP3 file (27Mb, 67:17)
• Subscribe to the RSS feed
• Get the show at iTunes

Messages from our sponsors: FIR is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years, www.ragan.com; Save time with the CustomScoop online clipping service: sign up for your free two-week trial, at www.customscoop.com/fir.

For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, for June 15, 2009: A 67-minute podcast recorded live from Concord, California, USA, and Wokingham, Berkshire, England.

Links for the blogs, individuals, companies and organizations we discussed or mentioned in the show are posted to the FIR Show Links pages at The New PR Wiki. You can contribute - see the show notes home page for info.

• FIR #457 show notes at The New PR Wiki

Share your comments or questions about this show, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR, or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

Join the FIR Discussion Forum and extend your conversations with the FIR community. You can also join the FIR Facebook Community and become an FIR friend.

To stay informed about occasional FIR events (eg, FIR Live), sign up for FIR Update email news.

So, until Thursday June 18…

Sunday, June 14, 2009

My review of the Palm Pre

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I finally got my hands on a Palm Pre, which I’m loving.

As much as I have coveted the iPhone, I’ve avoided getting one for a number of reasons. First, there’s AT&T, whose service I abandoned several years ago. The iPhone is great, but it still is exclusive to AT&T, and my experiences that were so bad I’m just not willing to relive them.

Beyond that, I want a real tactile keyboard. Apps are great but email, Twitter and texting occupy most of my time with a smartphone, and I just couldn’t get comfortable typing fast on the screen-based keyboard that is the iPhone’s only option. In fact, most people I know with an iPhone also carry a Blackberry or some other phone. The iPhone is their portable computer; the other phone is for email, texting and phone calls.

My travel schedule also demands that I be able to swap a fresh battery for a depleted one on the fly. I can’t stop and recharge my phone when it dies. That was another iPhone deal-killer for me.

So I was thrilled when the Pre was unveiled at CES—and named best product at the show. I’m already a Sprint customer, which I consider one of the hidden benefits of the Pre. The night before the Pre went on sale last Saturday, I called the store closest to me. The sales rep confirmed they’d have phones and I’d be able to score one if I got in line early enough. I was there around 6 a.m., but just before the store opened, a manager stepped outside and informed us the phones would only be given to those who had pre-ordered. I was furious as I sped to another store, where I was number 38 in line. I would have gotten a phone—the store had about 70—but because I had to be at a meeting, I couldn’t wait.

I tweeted my frustration at the first store—a franchise outlet, not a company store—and within a few minutes had a phone call and an email from a district manager who found me a phone and scheduled a time that accommodated my schedule for me to come pick it up and get it activated. That’s service, particularly since I was more interested in letting Sprint know about the issue with the franchise store (not my first problem with them) than in getting a phone (plenty will be available everywhere shortly).

So I’ve now had the phone for a couple days and can offer these observations.

It feels great. The phone fits comfortably in my hand or in my pocket. It has a nice, solid feel to it. It’s a bit thicker than the iPhone (accommodating the battery and the slide-out keyboard), but it’s also shorter. The incredibly sharp image shows that you don’t need a long phone in order to get great visuals.

The interface rocks. Operating the Pre is drop-dead easy. The main menu is activated by dragging your finger from the gesture area, just below the bottom of the screen, upward. Tap an icon to activate it, then swipe your finger left in the gesture area to turn it into a “card.” You can have multiple cards open at any one time, and navigate through them to enlarge the one you want to use. Getting rid of a card is a simple “flick” upward.

Phone quality is terrific. It’s a smartphone, which some of the smartphone makers seem to have forgotten. The quality of audio over the handset is great, maybe the best I’ve ever heard on a mobile phone, and I’m told by those who’ve called me or whom I’ve called that I sound great to them. The audio quality over my Bluetooth earbud is also better than it was with my last phone.

The camera takes amazingly good pictures. The 3.2 megapixel camera with built-in flash produces sharp images, like this unretouched image I shot of Scott Monty and Beth Harte at a pre-conference reception for BlogPotomac last week.

There’s no video camera yet (which is a drag, since I’ve been using my phone to demo Qik at conferences), but one is due via firmware upgrade, from what I’ve been told.

The app catalog currently is anemic but so was the iPhone app store when it was first released. I don’t buy the arguments that, given the iPhone’s two-year lead, the Pre app catalog should have come fully populated. The OS is new and Palm is cautiously introducing new apps regularly (one for Evernote just came out in the last day or two). The WebOS SDK has been touted as incredibly easy to use, so I fully expect a steady stream of apps, and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that some popular iPhone-only apps, like AudioBoo, will be made available in Pre versions. The apps I’ve grabbed so far, though, are terrific, including Tweed, a Twitter client.

In the meantime, an app called “Classic” has been released that lets you run older Palm applications on the Pre. Since I kill a lot of time waiting in lines and the like playing backgammon, this has proven a useful tool. I’ve also grabbed several of the apps that are available, including Tweed, a nifty Twitter client, AccuWather, and Pandora. In fact, I jacked the Pre into my car’s auxiliary input and listened to Pandora through the car speakers on my drive home from the airport yesterday. That was awfully damned cool.

The web browser might as well be the iPhone’s, which is a good thing. It loads quickly, runs Flash, and you can zoom in and out with the same pinching gesture as the iPhone uses.

Video player is terrific. I’ve been watching YouTube videos and others, which look gorgeous.

I’ve experienced a couple unprompted shutdown. On more than one occasion, I’ve pulled the phone from its holster only to find it shut off, requiring a restart. It also shut down once when I closed the keyboard a little too hard. I’m hopeful this will be addressed with a firmware update.

The keyboard is great. I’ve read a number of criticisms of the keyboard, but I don’t agree with them at all. I find it remarkably easy to thumb-type quickly, even faster than I could on my last phone, the HTC Touch Pro, the keyboard for which is considerably bigger. Also, the way the keyboard curves when slid out provides an angle that makes typing even easier.

There’s an issue with the power button. The power button is in the upper right-hand corner, which is easy to get to with your thumb, but when the keyboard is out, the power button drops out of reach. You can touch any key on the keyboard to bring the phone back from sleep mode, but I automatically reach for that power button. This is another design issue I expect will be addressed in the next iteration.

The data integration functionality looks like a major innovation. The “synergy” feature, as it’s being marketed, is one of the true points of differentiation for the Pre. There is no single point source for calendars, contacts, or tasks. Rather, you indicate where all these reside—whether it’s the Google calendar or Outlook—and it’s all linked up in the cloud, allowing you to pull everything together. I haven’t had much opportunity to use this yet, but it’ll definitely make life easier. Here’s a brief video that explains it.

Another nice touch is that notifications of recent emails and text messages show up on the bottom of the home screen.

Touchstone is awesome. The Touchstone, a separate accessory, puts a whole new spin on recharging a phone. Just set the Pre on the Touchstone (it adheres magnetically) and it recharges without requiring any cables to be jacked in. I’ve gone home, yanked the phone from its holster and dropped it on the Touchstone. Done! It’s not that big a deal to plug in a mini or micro USB cable, but there’s something about simply setting your phone down to charge it that feels like a major convenience.

Sprint services run exceptionally well on the Pre, including Sprint TV and Sprint navigation (which offers turn-by-turn directions, traffic information, and other services).

Nice touches are sprinkled throughout the phone, like the ability to copy text and take JPG screen captures.

Is it an iPhone killer?

I’ve been asked repeatedly if I think the Pre is an iPhone killer. When Applie first released the iPhone, my dominant reaction was that Apple had raised the expectation bar for smart phones, but that Nokia and other manufacturers wouldn’t sit idly and allow Apple to erode their market share. One Blackberry model outsold the iPhone in April and the iPhone, for all the attention it gets, commands just 1% of the global mobile phone market.

Nothing will kill the iPhone. It’s an elegant piece of innovation with huge cachet and a well-stocked app store. The Pre—which has sold briskly at the outset and been met with generally glowing reviews—represents a solid entry into the market and probably the first to offer some innovative and desirable features not available in the iPhone (like the synergy functionality). When a host of new Android phones are unleashed later this year, the competitive landscape will be even more crowded.

For right now, the Pre is the phone for me. And I have a new daily task: Check the app catalog for new downloads.

Has social media affected suppliers to PR?

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I interviewed several vendors who were exhibiting on the trade show floor at the recent IABC World Conference. Clearly, social media has had as profound an impact on those who provide products and service to the communications profession as it has on the communicators themselves.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

The News Release in the Social Media Era: Shel Holtz’s IABC presentation

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Content summary: Shel Holtz was part of the “All-Star” track at the annual world conference of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), presenting on the role of the news release in the social media era. The talk covered both the traditional news release and the social media release.

Both audio and PowerPoint are available here.

• Download the file here (MP3, 29.3Mb, 1:13:05).

Share your comments or questions about this podcast, or suggestions for future shows, in the FIR FriendFeed Room. You can also email us at fircomments@gmail.com; call the Comment Line at +1 206 222 2803 (North America), +44 20 8133 9844 (Europe), or Skype: fircomments; comment at Twitter: twitter.com/FIR or at Jaiku: fir.jaiku.com. You can email your comments, questions and suggestions as MP3 file attachments, if you wish (max. 3 minutes / 5Mb attachment, please!). We’ll be happy to see how we can include your audio contribution in a show.

To receive all For Immediate Release podcasts including the twice-weekly Hobson & Holtz Report, subscribe to the full RSS feed.

This FIR Speakers & Speeches podcast is brought to you with Lawrence Ragan Communications, serving communicators worldwide for 35 years. Information: www.ragan.com.